Editorial: Habitat for Humanity sidesteps red tape and tackles blight

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JIM MAHONEY/Staff Photographer

Much of Congo Street in the Jubilee Park neighborhood near Fair Park in Dallas looks the same as it has for decades. Only two blocks away, the Jubilee Park Community Center is offering ESL classes, crime is down and the staff has a number of plans for the near future. Photo was made on March 14, 2011. Jim Mahoney/The Dallas Morning News.

Recessions and tight budgets aren’t valid excuses for extending the decades of neglect, bad planning and unbalanced investment that created Dallas’ north-south divide. When the government can’t or won’t step up, nonprofit groups like Habitat for Humanity increasingly are taking charge with projects that have a demonstrably positive impact around southern Dallas.

Habitat’s track record is so impressive — and so closely matches this newspaper’s stated goals for southern Dallas — that its ongoing Dream Dallas campaign merits undivided attention on today’s editorial page. We want to urge donors big and small to help Habitat meet an ambitious $100 million goal for improvement projects in five of the neediest southern Dallas neighborhoods.

We all know what the Dallas philanthropic community can do when a worthy project beckons. Just look at the $334 million donated to the AT&T Performing Arts Center, the more than $37 million raised for the Woodall Rodgers Deck Park, or the $175 million collected for the Perot Museum of Nature & Science. All will be signature features in the bid to boost our city’s profile.

From southern Dallas residents’ perspective, though, such projects also reinforce the existing imbalance. They see a rising tide of philanthropy floating the northern Dallas ship ever higher, while southern Dallas remains firmly anchored in the mud. That must change.

For conservatives who demand fiscal responsibility and reduced reliance on government largesse, Habitat is an organization that walks the walk. It stretches donations, creates jobs, generates home ownership, strengthens families, boosts educational performance and even reduces crime with its transformational approach to troubled neighborhoods.

“It’s an incredibly conservative” program, says Michael Gruber, an attorney who chairs the Dream Dallas advisory council. “We’re hypocritical enough to take whatever government money we can, but we don’t think the government can spend it correctly. We know that we can spend federal dollars a whole lot better than the government can.”

This is no give-away charity. Homeowners must qualify for Habitat loans and pay them back on schedule. Volunteers build the houses, so there’s built-in cost efficiency. Repaid loan money gets plowed back into the fund for future homebuilding. “It’s self-sustaining, and there really isn’t a continuing government assistance,” Gruber says.

We recently heralded Habitat’s impressive work demolishing eyesores, building new homes and fixing up the neighborhood in Mill City, near Fair Park. Dream Dallas will invest $17 million in West Dallas to build 75 new homes, refurbish 20 others and purchase dozens of vacant lots or nuisance properties. In South Dallas/Fair Park, a $20 million investment is building 105 new homes and refurbishing 20 others. Similarly sized projects are underway in Bonton, Joppa and the Lancaster transportation corridor surrounding DART’s VA Medical Center station.

Nearly 1,800 family members will see a wholesale change in the quality of their housing. Family heads will receive lessons in financial management so they can properly budget, pay taxes and exercise the responsibilities of home ownership. They’ll also learn how to maintain their homes and keep lawns in shape. A separate program helps repaint and repair neighboring houses to give the entire block a nicer look.

An economic-impact study prepared at Southern Methodist University found that for every dollar Habitat spends, $3.18 in new economic activity gets generated. So helping Habitat meet its $100 million fundraising goal by 2013 could have the effect of injecting an additional $300 million into the economy.

Last month, we devoted an entire Sunday Points section to an analysis of 27 crime hot spots in Dallas. A common feature in nearly every hot spot is a heavily lopsided ratio of rental residential property to owner-occupied homes. Rental properties, especially in economically troubled areas, tend to be magnets for crime.

When Habitat fixes up a neighborhood, violent crime drops 32 percent, the organization says. Children from homeowner families are twice as likely to graduate from college as children growing up in rental properties. When a sagging eyesore of a house is replaced by a Habitat home, it goes from being a net drain on city resources to a tax-producing property. The 750 new homes planned under Dream Dallas are expected to add $67 million to the local property base, the SMU study says.

Habitat’s focus is on building responsible homeownership among those already in the community to cultivate a healthier owner-renter mix. In almost every project location, Habitat is careful to build partnerships with existing community development corporations.

The organization also works to encourage business development nearby so residents don’t continue to face the same challenge of living miles away from grocery and retail stores.

For years, this newspaper has advocated efforts by the city to clamp down on egregious code violators, especially house owners who abandon their property and leave it to be ransacked by scavengers and drug users. The city government must work through a cumbersome legal tangle before gaining title over such properties and condemning them.

That can take years. Habitat simply buys such properties outright and makes quick work of the bureaucratic morass.

As Dallas Habitat chief executive officer Bill Hall notes, it took 40 to 50 years of sustained economic injustice to create Dallas’ north-south divide, and none of these problems will disappear overnight. While others are busy making excuses for why they can’t find a solution, Habitat’s volunteers are drowning out the noise of the naysayers and letting their saws and hammers do the talking.

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